Activision Publishing teams up with Flurry to release third-party mobile games | Hadoop Summit Brings Wave of Product Enhancements | Cvent buys Seed Labs to help manage $6B of events in 2012 | Future Deep Space Missions Could Have Robotic Vegetable Gardens | This mobile app will help you meet people, and will pay you to do it

Activision Publishing is about to make some big investments in mobile games. One of the ways it will do so is through a third-party publishing platform via a partnership with analytics firm Flurry.Under the partnership, Activision Publishing will release games made by outside developers under the Activision Mobile Publishing brand. The developers will retain full control of their intellectual property, and Flurry will provide its mobile analytics and advertising platform.Activision Publishing, a division of Activision Blizzard in Santa Monica, Calif., hasn’t been as active as other big players in the mobile space such as Electronic Arts, Zynga, and Gameloft. But it is committed to th[...]

With the Hadoop Summit taking place this week in San Jose, California, vendors supporting the open-source data-analysis platform are rushing new products to market.Over 2,100 attendees are expected at the conference, which has been sponsored by IT heavyweights such as Cisco, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Splunk and VMware. This is the fifth annual summit, and while last year's conference felt like it was aimed at developers, this year's event is far more customer-focused, observed Jack Norris, the vice president of marketing for Hadoop distributor MapR, who is on site on the conference show floor.Created in 2005 to analyze large amounts of Web traffic logs, Hadoop is increasingly being used fo[...]

What if playing a game on your smartphone meant meeting a new friend, being entertained, and making actual cash? That’s what Japanese startup Phewtick wants to bring to the global market.But there are obvious safety issues that come with meeting people in person after connecting on an app. Those issues came to light recently when dating application Skout had to suspend teenage users after a number of rape cases surfaced. The “flirting” app had a section specifically for kids aged 13-years-old to 17-years-old. Adults, however, were sneaking into the section and violating the underaged users. Three cases have been reported thus far.Phewtick launched in Korea today, and is e[...]